Monday, September 16, 2013

NYTimes: "No Child Left Untableted"

At The New York Times, Carlo Rotella's “No Child Left Untableted” is a good look at what's happening to those who'll be our students in a decade or so. Rotella calls the businesspeople "smart and well-intentioned," but he does have some reservations. A few quotations, with some thoughts:

There are a lot of people who are trying to make informed, thoughtful choices about educational policies, like Greg Anrig:

Greg Anrig, vice president of policy and programs at the Century Foundation and the author of "Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools," [says that] The research on successful schools and good teaching . . . highlights the importance of relationships among the people in a school: administrators and teachers and students. “None of these studies identify technology as decisive.” Where technology makes a difference, it tends to do so in places with a strong organization dedicated to improving teaching and where students closely engage with teachers and one another. “A device that enhances such interactions is good,” Anrig said. “But kids focused on the device, isolated, cuts into that.”

2. But others are focused more on the financial killing to be made.

The first time I met with Joel Klein, the chief executive of Amplify
and an executive vice president of News Corporation, he checked his e-mail on
his phone a lot, even as we talked about the concern that technology isolates
rather than connects people. I pointed this out, and he, in turn, expressed
wonder that I don’t even allow the use of laptops in my classroom.

First, I’m impressed that Carlo Rotella sat
through this epic display of rudeness, when most of us would have walked
out.
Second, I love the irony of this: that Klein can’t be bothered to hold an actual
conversation with a person sitting in front of him but is most interested in
preaching his vision. Of course, that’s what salesmen do—talk and only listen just
enough so that they can interrupt you with selling points--but if you’re buying
a car, you have a choice of which pitchmen to listen to. Children in schools
equipped with Klein’s lucrative-for-Amplify “vision” won’t have that choice.

3. But at least Klein still thinks teachers have a
role to play:

They might begin by transferring to it what they already do now
— existing lessons, homework, tests — but it can only make the hoped-for
difference in how and what students learn if teachers come up with new ways to
use it. “If it’s not transformative,” Klein told me, “it’s not worth it.”

[. . .]

He did go on to say that he wouldn’t put fourth
graders in a MOOC — a massive open online course — and that he would exercise
great restraint in introducing technology into a kindergarten classroom.

Should I say "Well, that's big of him"? No? Okay. I won't.
4. But data is the future:

Soon, games that know what a student has read (the tablet’s library will contain 1,000 books) will be able to strategically sprinkle a particular word in his path based on how many times the research says you need to see a new word in order to learn it. In a few years, according to Leites, advances like “gaze tracking” and measurement of pupil dilation “will revolutionize” the gauging of cognitive response by making it possible to determine exactly what students are reacting to on the screen.

Am I the only one who finds this a little creepy and a little sad?

5. The teaching end of this article fares better, as in the training session with Robin Britt, the “Personalized Learning
Environment Facilitator (PLEF),” which I misread initially as “pelf,” Sinclair Lewis’s
slang word for “wealth.”

Britt repeatedly made a fluid
gathering-and-pushing gesture with both hands, as if demonstrating a basketball
chest pass, as he said: “Then you move that group out, they’re off practicing
to reinforce what you just taught them, and you pull together another group, or
you go to an individual, then you flow them out to the next task. Gather and
flow.”

I hadn’t seen this passage when I used basketball as a
metaphor the other day, but in this context, it’s individual basketball.
Passing from person to person among the players themselves doesn’t seem to
count. Still, it's interaction.

6. What will interacting with screens for six hours a day do to their eyes? Well, what does it do to your eyes?

And overstimulation can just plain hurt. Erika
Gutscher, who teaches science at a year-round school in East Cary, N.C., that
has been piloting the Amplify tablet since March, reports that she and her
students love the tablets but get headaches if they use them too much.

Haven’t you found the same thing—that too much screen time
numbs you or can give you a headache? Not to mention the (dead horse topic
alert: cursive!) issue of brain connections made when students use pen and
paper to write things down.

7. And a big-picture view from Sherry Turkle.

Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. professor and a
prominent Cassandra who writes about the unanticipated consequences of our
immersion in electronic technology, described some aspects of tablets in the
classroom to me as “the dystopian presented as the utopian.” She said, “We
become smitten with the idea that there will be technological solutions to
these knotty problems with education, but it happens over and over again that
we stop talking to kids. . . . “There’s a reason they call them ‘discussion
groups’ and not ‘conversations,’ ” Turkle said. “You learn how to broadcast,
which is not the same thing as what you and I are doing now. Posting strong
opinions isn’t a conversation.”

Thank you, Sherry Turkle! “We stop talking to kids.” Or we
stop having discussions with each other in classrooms. Or we look at cell
phones and check email while preaching our message without listening.

And Britt, the PLEF trainer, gets it, too:

As he told them more than once, “It’s the teacher, not the
technology.”

Asked how to handle students goofing off on the tablet in
class, Britt reviewed the mechanics of the app blocker. “But,” he added,
“that’s a case where maybe you want to use proximity instead.” Proximity? A
couple of the trainees started scanning their tablets’ apps in the hope of
finding that feature. Maybe it controlled a miniature drone. But Britt moved up
the row of desks to stand right next to the questioner and said to everyone:
“You already know how to do this. You keep going with the lesson but you move
closer, you show him you can see what he’s doing.”

"You already know how to do this." Yes. Yes, we do. And you can't find everything you need on a screen.

5 comments:

I guess it never occurred to me that they might actually make everything done in the classroom be done on the iPad --- I guess I had assumed it would be just some things.

(I do have one thing that would make me happy about iPads becoming classroom staples --- the fact that they can be used so effectively as communication devices for people who can't speak. They are WAY cheaper than older types of communication devices, and they can do a lot more things.)

Lindsay--I agree. The iPad would seem to be great for accessibility issues. I'm not sure if they use the tablet for everything, but to me, it's the variety of shifting from screen to paper that makes meaning pop out.

Why must it always be iPads? Why not save thousands of dollars on cheaper tablets with free software on? Oh: because then you'd have to hire competent IT staff to set them up and lock them down. But seriously; the costs of iPads vs. an anyname Android tablet, why does this even begin to be the default? My suspicion: because the people ordering the purchases have heard of iPads and consider anything else dfferent and strange so assume that the students can't cope because they couldn't. But this model is already assuming a classroom most such people couldn't teach in, and perhaps as you suggest, Undine, because they understand what works in teaching better than the people who could. The head needs to meet the hands in some other way than this expensive facepalm.

(Hey, remember Palms? Didn't we have this conversation about them too, long ago... ?)